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Subtle Humility
“There is a certain type of subtle humility that is born of presumption, like this one: that we acknowledge our ignorance in many things, and are so courteous as to admit that there are in the works of nature certain qualities and conditions that are imperceptible to us and whose means and causes our capacity…
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I exist only within myself
“As for me, I hold that I exist only in myself; and as for that other life of mine that lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering it naked and simply in itself, I know very well that I feel no fruit or enjoyment from it except by the vanity of a fanciful opinion.”…
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A book consubstantial with its author
I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author […] For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes his study, his work, and his…
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Whatever side we lean to
“Because in human matters, whatever side we lean to, we find many probabilities to confirm us in it…” II.17 “Of presumption” (pp. 603)
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Seek not the world
“Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself.” I.39 “Of solitude” (p. 221)
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What I chiefly portray is my cogitations
“What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. … It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.” II.6 “Of practice”…
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A thorny undertaking
“It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depth of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it. And it is a new and extraordinary amusement, which withdraws us from the…
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As deep as I know how
“For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not…
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What matters is how we see it
“To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our own. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it.” I. 14 “That the taste of…
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Education is not regurgitation
“Let him be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson, but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the testimony not of his memory, but of his life. Let him be made to show what he has just learned in a hundred…